Contrast Of Cultural Values Embodied In Chinese And Western Pro-environmental Public Service Advertisements

As a mode of transmission, advertising contains various cultural information in both contents and forms, like cultural values, beliefs, and etc. It provides value guidance for the development of social culture by molding certain value ideals and offering value criteria, hence, carrying cultural functions. Public Service Advertising (PSA), as a special advertising, is not intended for creating product image or promoting service. It focuses on people, their thoughts and behaviors. Penetrating from social phenomena, using vivid images and languages as well as modern media, PSA has made great contributions to social civilization by publicizing traditional virtues, upholding justice and pointing out problems. Therefore, PSA is said to bear much more cultural themes while desalinating commerciality and is the most effective one among various advertising forms to reflect its function of guiding culture.With the increasing integration and multi-development of economy, environmental problems are also globalized. Pro-environment PSA is aimed at publicizing ecological and environmental problems, arousing the general public's awareness of environmental preservation and stimulating them to take actions to protect the environment. Being a type of public service advertising, pro-environmental PSA is also a container of cultural information. Values are the core of culture. Due to different social and cultural backgrounds and processes of social development, Chinese and Western people have different values, some of which can be traced from Chinese and Western pro-environmental PSAs.The author of this thesis looked for pro-environmental PSAs from magazines and the internet and selected representative ones to explain the similarities and differences of cultural values embodied in Chinese and Western pro-environmental PSAs. Close analysis was carried out under the guidance of Hofstede's Cultural Value Dimension and Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's Cultural Value Orientations, on the aspects including social relationship, relationship of humankind to nature, sense of time. The author found out that major cultural value similarity reflected in pro-environmental PSAs is responsibility while major differences of cultural values lie in the following aspects:collectivism vs. individualism, harmony with nature vs. dominance of nature and past-orientation vs. future orientation, implication vs. directness, imagination and humor. It is expected that the findings of this thesis can help the pro-environmental PSA producers better design pro-environmental PSAs, and raise the general public's awareness to preserve the environment.